Lightning Flame review for Scalify: Facebook & Google Ads

May 15, 2020

Would give 0 stars if I could. Horrible app, sent thousands of spam traffic visitors to my website while campaign building. Not while the campaign was running, while the campaigns were being built! Creator refuses to take responsibility for this, and insists Scalify can do no such thing. We have established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the source of this spam traffic was Scalify and still he insists that there is no way this is possible. I am not the developer to tell your team what is causing this issue or how to troubleshoot it from a programming and coding point of view, I am the end user telling you your app has an issue with creating large amounts of spam traffic to sites while building large campaigns. Whether the app does this as a byproduct of inserting the appropriate links for each ad being created, I don't know, and it's not for me to solve, that is for the development team! The back and forth emails with the CEO trying to establish this point was seriously ridiculous. All that was done was deny responsibility, a real waste of our teams time even writing those emails! This issue is for the developer team to solve. Not the end user that is pointing out the issue! All email correspondents were the creator of Scalify denying responsibility for the actions of his app, rather than taking the steps to see why this has happened. Even after evidence was provided to substantiate our claims! Screenshots of discrepancies between traffic seen on our Shopify store (5000 visitors), and unique link clicks triggered on facebook (only 100 clicks). Strongly advise against using this app if you do not want to receive thousands of spam visitors on your site. We had to take extra measures to minimize the impact this had on our Facebook Pixel. Please think twice before downloading this app, it does what is advertised, it creates the ads you want. But at what cost? At the cost of demolishing your seasoned pixel! Not worth it in my opinion. To add insult to injury, the CEO won't properly look into the issue of why the app is behaving in this manner. He simply deflects blame away from Scalify denying it has anything to do with it. Again, it is clear to us beyond a shadow of a doubt that Scalify, while building our campaigns, was the source of this spam traffic in the thousands! ----------In response to Yassirs review reply--------------- It's good to see you are still not taking responsibility for your app. Thanks for making that even clearer for anyone reading this review. Also good to know that confidentiality isn't a concept over at Scalify. I had avoided attaching email contents in my review but if this is how you're handling this situation, again rather than addressing the actual issue with your app, I have also attached the email sent to Yassir prior to getting the reply he attached below. -------Quoted from last communication through "support"---------- Yas, I would extend the same advice to you that you gave to us. "It is always better to think what I did wrong instead of trying to blame others for a bad outcome.” I am aware loses are a normal part of building campaigns, and I am prepared for such an outcome. In other cases where we lost money on ads, we were at least able to go back to the ad performance and study CTR, CPC etc. No such experience with the Scalify created campaign, 5000 clicks were nowhere to be seen on the facebook ads manager. Now to reiterate what I tried to communicate in my previous email, we have spent similar amounts in the past and have not seen THOUSANDS of visitors come to our site in a matter of SECONDS. The spike in traffic was immense and immediate. Again, to eliminate other possibilities and be sure where it was coming from, we stopped the campaign building and saw traffic drop dramatically back to our regular range. I’m sure you know that facebook doesn’t give instantaneous traffic results within the first seconds of a campaign actually running, let alone a campaign that is still being built not even actually running!! This is no small anomaly, and should be addressed with a little more seriousness from you and your development team, rather than deflecting blame to Facebook. How your app works is for you and your developers to discuss and troubleshoot, what you have described to me is how you would like your app to work ideally, but clearly from our experience at Lightning Flame it is not working in that manner. You should be thanking us for pointing out such a major flaw in your campaign building, not deflecting blame and ignoring the actual issue that is present in your app. I have attached screenshots of our facebook ads manager, showing only 100 Unique clicks from the campaign….. 100!!!! Not 5000, ONLY 100!! And that is after the campaign started running, not while it was being built which is when we got all the spam traffic. I’ve also attached a screenshot of our Shopify backend showing over 5000 visitors…. those visitors came to our site WHILE the campaign was being built by Scalify, not while it was running... while it was being BUILT. Never in my facebook ads experience have I had an ad perform and bring traffic to our site before I even published it, I’m sure you see how ridiculous it would be to claim otherwise. Ads can’t bring genuine traffic from facebook users…. If they’re still not even published on facebook! Come on Yas, you know better than that. "Now addressing the assumption that the traffic you are receiving was not from humans.”… this was no assumption, we can clearly tell if traffic is not genuine by using Facebook ads metrics, Shopify metrics, and other tools that we have. "you are pretty much saying that the Facebook campaign is sending you bot traffic.”… please don’t tell me what I’m pretty much saying and rather refer to what I actually say. As I said in the previous email "We isolated the variables as we were seeing all the spam traffic. We stopped the campaign building being done by Scalify and saw the spam traffic drop off 100% to nothing, then when campaign building was brought back on again, unfortunately it was clear that the spam/bad traffic was coming from Scalify.” We have been using facebook ads for a while, and never had this issue. So no, I’m not “pretty much saying that facebook” has sent me spam traffic. I’m saying Scalify, whether by a software bug or otherwise, has directed spam/bot traffic to our site. That is a fact, how this fact is handled is a whole other story. Please take a little more responsibility for what your app is doing once it has access to a businesses store! The fact that you are simply deflecting all blame to Facebooks API is really unfortunate. I would have hoped that you would take this feedback from a client a little more seriously, and with a little more initiative. I leave you with the aforementioned screenshots so that you may be able to evaluate the situation more logically. Cheers, Jordan A. Riddell Team at Lightning Flame" -------------- End Quote--------------- The way you're handling all this is quite disappointing, and quite telling. To claim I "think" Scalify sent the spam traffic is hurtful and very unfair. It simply shows how little you grasp the issue I am attempting to report, and how little you respect and value actual real feedback from your users. We have presented the evidence for our claims, and stated how we reached our conclusion, none of our evidence has been addressed, rather you state how you would ideally like your app to work over and over again. Cyclic never ending conversation thanks to your lack of accountability. Something that is also telling of how little knowledge you truly have of what your app is doing is to claim you need 5000 Unique IP proxies in order to achieve 5000 website sessions. Firstly, nowhere did I say Scalify was deliberately sending this traffic on purpose, I simply stated that this is what happened in hopes of fixing it. For some reason you have taken it as an accusation rather than a bug report. You do not need 5000 unique IPs to have 5000 sessions, if I visit my website from my own IP address, then close the tab and visit the site again, then close that tab and visit the site a third time, guess what... I get 3 sessions registered on Shopify even though they were all from the same IP... Please expand your understanding, especially if this knowledge is pertinent to your apps performance. Highly disappointing experience with Scalify, and an even more disappointing experience trying to resolve the bug by corresponding with Yassir